Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, linguist and professional slacker. This week, we're learning how to make a #*$%&+@<>!! powerpoint presentation. Again.
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Lesson planning is a necessary evil in education circles. Doing it right is a time-consuming, attention-intensive, exercise in sustained concentration. The one silver lining is that once you've made lesson materials, you can re-use them over and over. As long as you're teaching the same subject. To different students. In the same classroom. However, when forces outside your control, like a global pandemic, force your entire classroom online for the foreseeable future, lesson planning goes back to square one. It sucks.
This goes with this and, voila, you’re done! Right? Right…? Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash
I mentioned a couple of issues ago that, in an effort to keep up with my lesson planning, I was going to rely on PDFs and JPGs. And, so far, so good. With one problem. The university I work for took a survey of our students and came to one not-at-all-surprising conclusion: students felt isolated and alone. Further, they felt like they had no idea who their teachers were and felt no connection to either their teachers or their classmates, which just makes for a really crappy learning environment. And so, the university requested that we teachers add audio and video elements to our lessons to help combat the isolation brought on by the plague.
There are only two problems with this: one, it means I have to redo all the PDFs I made last semester as powerpoint presentations and two, I really, really hate putting audio and video elements of myself into my presentations.
There's a trap that gets easier and easier to fall into as we get older and more expert with certain ways of doing things. We forget, or, more often, fail to learn other ways of doing the same things. This trap leads us to sabotage ourselves by anticipating and correcting for obstacles that are not really present. In this particular instance, and the example from which I'm attempting to learn, is that making introductory presentations is much easier than it used to be.
The last time I made any presentation decks was about ten years ago. They were very simple because the software had a learning curve I was not willing to navigate just to make some simple slideshows for elementary school students. Not that they didn't deserve well-created materials, just that the materials did not need to be intricate or complicated as they were merely an aid, not the lesson-in-full. So, very simple slideshows of animals was the name of the game. No problem.
Similarly, recording myself has been, for the past few times I've done it, a pain. Well, the recording is easy. Getting that recording into the computer and then editing it and exporting to various formats and media in order to be seen and heard is...not fun. And that's not even getting into any issues of how I look or sound on the recording in question.
Between these two experiences, I managed to build more than a few obstacles for myself. I couldn't get started, obviously, until I had pre-written everything I would need to go over in the class. Then I had to find all the perfect background pictures - ones that were interesting but left enough free space for me to fill with text. Then I had to figure out the best recording software and read up on how to export and import audio files...you get the picture. All these problems that I just had to solve before I could even get started doing the work.
Found this image under “obstacle.” Massive, mobile, and unstoppable? Seems about right. Photo by Yann Allegre on Unsplash
Here's the reality in late 2020: Keynote (the Mac alternative to PowerPoint) is really, really easy to use. I can copy / paste from my PDFs. I don't need background pictures because they have a lot of visually interesting templates perfect for long, detailed presentations, and, here's the kicker, it has audio / video recording features built in. I don't have to import or export a damned thing. I just click the button, make a few comments and that's it. Bob's your uncle and the presentation for this week is made.
Like I said, I'm trying to learn from this. I'm working on the idea that obstacles don't always need to be considered in advance. It's more important, and more useful, to get started on the task and only deal with the obstacles that actually appear. Bringing this idea into my thinking and keeping it in mind as I deal with a whole bunch of projects that are half-done or not-started because of imaginary obstacles is a process to be sure, but one I'm working on. And some weeks, that's as much as can be asked for.
New Glossary on Friday. Until then, stay safe, stay focused. Learn something.
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Joel